The Boy at the Ice Machine
by National Wolves
Summary: Modern au of the events in ATLA with some slight plot and pairing changes.


The Boy at the Ice Machine

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a school's climate shall run in direct and extreme opposition to the regional weather patterns in which it stands. Therefore, the air conditioner at McKinley High School had been on blast for the past month. Summer was tossing fiery hints of its imminent arrival outside, but inside the school, the kids were swaddled in parkas, their bodies fluffed up like microwaved marshmallows and their faces haloed with faux fur.

Amongst the sea of puffed pastries in the cafeteria, a boy (though he would say guy, or young man, or something else more suitable to his aspirations of masculine authority) sat struggling to open a bag of Doritos at one of the tables. The only other person at the table, his sister, watched on amused by the wrenching, the jabbing, the biting, and the increasingly obvious frustration in her brother's expressions.

"They make these just to mess with people at their hungriest," he grunted at his sister.

Her smirk had begun to leak into poorly concealed laughter. "Why don't you just pop it like last time?" she teased.

"There's a special place in hell for the people who make these bags," he continued. "You episcopalians or whatever you are now don't have to deal with these fribenniffenwinyen." His words caught behind his gritted teeth as he dove into an another attempt at the packaging.

"It's 'pescatarian,' meathead, and I'm not even one. I just stopped eating super processed food." She looked down happily at the lunch she packed laid out in front of her brown paper bag. Salmon and rice pilaf. Tomato slices in pesto. Blueberries. A half moon of pita. She thought Gran-gran would be proud (and would probably ask for a bite, too). "I saw a Vice clip saying that junk food like that will make you feel weak and tired," she goaded. She arched an eyebrow in the direction of her brother's unopened chips indicating the challenge she had just laid down.

"Just because you start eating acai and taking tai chi, you think you're some kind of warrior all of a sudden. But remember, baby sis, being a warrior isn't just about brawn." He reached beneath his coat and into his pocket. "It's about being prepared." He pulled out their dad's old pocket knife.

"Sokka!" his sister whisper-yelled as her hand swung to confiscate the concealed weapon. He pulled it back toward himself, narrowly avoiding his sister's swipe. After a quick scan of the room for any witnesses, she set her sites on her idiot brother, berating him in hushed tones, "You know you can't bring that to school."

"First they take our land. Then they take our culture. Now they want to take my hunting rights?!" He pronounced his reasoning with the authority of an iceberg confronted with the Titanic.

Unfortunately his sister was more like an ice breaker. "Have we sunk down to hunting Doritos now?"

"It's the principle of the matter!" He retorted, but the defensiveness and voice crack revealed the boy who was just seconds ago wearing the costume of a man.

His sister, not to be thwarted by her brother twice, swept her arm across the table and this time nabbed what she wanted: Sokka's intended plastic prey. "Let me try. Sometimes it requires a warrior's touch," she mocked. Placing the bag on the table, she took an over exaggerated breath and began a charade of the first tai chi steps, although anyone observing could've seen that the mockery for her was just a guise to sincerely practice the skills. Tai chi, after all, was the closest thing to waterbending she could study.

Sokka, for his part, wasn't watching. Instead, he returned the knife to his pocket and decided what to eat as his sister worked at opening the unopenable. "You know, I can probably bring it back and get a new one. I think this one's just messed up. The lunch lady and I—" He stopped mid-sentence as a hail of crunchy triangles and a mist of cheese dust fell on his head, tinting his pulled-back mohawk orange. A few students, plush as Michelin tire mascots, turned their poofs to see the isolated cheddar storm.

"Sokka! I'm sorry I—"

Sokka growled at his sister, "Katara! This is ten times worse than when I popped the bag all over the floor! Why couldn't you just stay out of it! Girl's always need to show off that they can do anything better than a guy, and look how it ends up!" The neighboring tables had begun to fall silent to watch the unfolding drama. Sokka brushed some of the powder off his parka after his tirade and didn't notice the sea of eyes or the steam shooting from Katara's ears.

She stood up and howled, "You are the most sexist." She threw a Dorito from the carnage at her brother's fluff-protected torso. "Nutbrained." She pegged another at him. "I'm embarrassed." She grabbed a handful of chips and shot them right into his face. "To even be related to you!"

More for the melodrama than the message, the cafeteria broke into applause accompanied by the underscore of jangling zippers and swishing polyester. No one had noticed the quivering of the Katara's water bottle during her tirade. Before either of the siblings even had time to take a bow for their performance, a voice came over the cafeteria intercom to sing a refrain "Alright, alright. Settle down.". Katara looked around the room to see the coats turning back toward their conversations. She went to sit down and hide herself from any avenging administrators, but before she sank, she noticed the light of the ice machine glowing as a cup pressed against it, and beside it, a new kid . Revise that: she made eye contact with a new kid by the ice machine. And as anyone who has made soul-searing eye contact with a stranger across the room would do, she quickly averted her eyes and outwardly pretended it hadn't happened.

Another eye, too, flicked up at the glow. It would have been two, but this would not be the first or last time the scar would obscure Zuko's view. In another corner of the cafeteria from the siblings, a boy posh and jaded, gazed up from the small collection of friends at his table toward the light, then at the kid. Zuko knew in an instant who it was.

Something seemed familiar about him to the girl, as well. She could easily put her finger on what made him seem young: the height, the baby face, the smile no boy acting grown would ever wear. She could easily figure out what made him seem strange: the dog, the blue arrow ball cap, the obvious lack of a coat in the coldest place outside of the arctic. But the familiarity piece was currently MIA.

As his sister started to eat with a pensive expression, Sokka chanced an apology, "Sorry, sis. I guess I might've gone too far."

"It's okay," she said despondently between bites. Then a few seconds later, "Have we seen that kid by the ice machine before?"

Sokka looked in the machine's direction. "What kid by the ice machine?"

"Hey, could I sit with y'all?" asked the kid who was no longer by the ice machine. Now he was the kid by their table. He had the exact voice Katara had imagined, high and raspy like the wind squeezing through the crack in a window.

"Sure, buddy!" Sokka said magnanimously, though not without a hint of skepticism. Katara's brother was not the most socially equipped person at the school, but he knew enough to be polite until he figured out how a new kid's dice might fall. He offered, "Mi table es tu table."

"Woah! Do you take Spanish?" asked the boy excitedly as he settled at su table.

"Ci," replied Sokka's inflated ego. Then, unable to think of anymore Spanish phrases, he turned the conversation to avoid revealing this flaw. "I'm Sokka, and this is my little sister Katara." He gestured toward her.

"Hi," Katara said, "I'm only a year and a half younger, but I've got two years on him in maturity." The new kid laughed at Katara's joke but smiled at Sokka so he knew it wasn't taken to heart. But instead of a genial smile, Sokka nearly jumped out of his seat as a tongue moved up his thigh.

"Appa, come back over here," the boy laughed out, "We haven't even introduced ourselves. My name's Aang and this is my friend Appa." Aang added with a wink, "I think he likes you, Sokka."

The name didn't sound a bell for Katara, but her spidey senses were still at large, and she was determined to solve the mystery of where she knew this boy from. She spoke while Aang pulled his dog back from Sokka, who was now sitting with his legs tightly closed. "This might be weird, and I might be making this up, but I feel like I've seen you somewhere before."

"You know what?" Aang leaned into the table conspiratorially, "I think I've seen you somewhere before, too!" Katara's eyes widened hopefully as if she was asking, _really?_ Sokka's eyebrow cocked as if to cynically ask the same question. "Really." The boy affirmed as if taking their facial expressions as voiced questions that required an answer. "I saw you..." he whispered. Then he paused. Even Appa stilled with anticipation. "Throwing chips at a sexist just a minute ago!" The boy grinned at Sokka, "Although I'm guessing he regrets whatever he said at this point."

Sokka laughed at Katara's expense. "Nice one, bro!" he congratulated as he threw out his fist for an affirmative bump, but like a pair of shoes on a telephone wire, he was left hanging. "Rough," said the dejected brother.

The boy tilted his head the way a puppy might while it happily listens to words it doesn't understand. "What?" asked the boy.

"You're leaving me bumpless here," Sokka replied.

"Bumpless?" The puppy said with naivete so potent it nearly cleared Sokka's acne.

"Dude!" Sokka exclaimed, "You gotta put your fist out and bump it into mine. It's how you show solidarity!" The boy followed Sokka's instructions (most likely a direct quote from the bro code).

Throughout the instructions on fraternity, Katara stewed pensively and focused on eating her lunch. She chewed a few sour blueberries and a few sour thoughts and feelings. Then she chewed on a few sweet blueberries and re-assessed whether she actually recognized Aang. She decided not to follow up right away, but she kept staring at the kid while they continued their conversation. Sokka had started introducing him to the school social layout, full Mean Girls style. "So you have the earthy kids over there, and the—"

"The earthy kids?" Katara interrupted.

"Yeah, they're like super earthy, or like they're dirty, but not exactly," stumbled Sokka.

"I don't even know who you might be referring to," said Katara as she cocked a judgmental eyebrow. "Basically, you'll see all kinds of people if you go to clubs and classes, but everyone sits with the people they know. So, if your families go to the same country club, that's your clique."

"And if you got in because of scholarships and affirmative action and everyone in school knows it, you're at the right place," Sokka added acerbically. Katara sharpened her eyes at her brother. But the cut was dulled by Sokka's familiarity with his sister's pride.

Instead Katara went to injure her brother with wit. "Sokka's just upset because he couldn't finesse his way into some skeezy friend group despite his dazzling grace and bloated ego."

"I'm not the only one at the loser table!" Sokka's eyes attempted to shoot lasers at his sister who was equally engaged in making laser beams of her own for him.

"Yeah, now I'm here, too!" Aang rang out, ending the siblings' reenactment of Star Wars. Each embarrassed in their own private Chekhovian way, they filled their mouths as an excuse for silence.

"So where are you from?" asked Sokka as their food supplies dwindled, breaking the insecure pause like a foot on thinning spring ice. "I know that's majorly racist when white people ask, but we're Native, so I think it's our right to know where we should send everyone back to when we decide to take over again."

Katara stepped in to act as both a diplomat for her brother's lack of grace and as a spy to dig a little deeper for answers to her own questions. "I think what my bigoted brother is trying to ask is 'what's your story?' It's okay if you don't want to cover every minute of the fourteen years of your life, but we'd love to know more about you." She wrapped up with the bow of her smile as a decorative touch to her Trojan horse question.

"Well, for starters, I'm fifteen," he laughed. _He reallllly looks young, then_ , Katara thought, chastising herself for her assumption. Aang went on, "But it's a pretty boring story anyway." He rubbed his head beneath his hat and smiled.

"Okay, just one interesting thing that's happened," Katara pleaded.

"Well, did you know Appa can fly?" He smoothed the pale coat of his flying dog.

Sokka's eyes went wide. "Really?!"

"No," Aang giggled, "he's just a regular therapy dog." Katara, on the other hand, was a fountain of laughter, amazed by her brother's gullibility.

"Now you really owe us an interesting fact," Sokka demanded. But, at hearing the mention of facts, academia called, ringing her silver bell to beckon her followers. And hundreds of stuffed (in coat and stomach) students rose in a swarm.

"Well," Aang shouted over the swath of voices and bodies pressing against one another, "I've never been to a real school before." The boy no longer by the ice machine then started to walk even farther away from the ice machine toward the door along with Appa. The two siblings finished packing their things much too stunned to pay any true attention to their activity, and much much too stunned to say another word as they flowed on a human current into the bottleneck of students through the door and then out into classes.

—-

Zuko slammed his way into the apartment. He slammed the door. He slammed his backpack on the kitchen island with the zipper of his coat adding a festive jingle. He slammed the freezer and microwave in his afternoon hot pocket preparations. "Hello, nephew," sang a rough, gentle, and accented voice either unperturbed or unaware of Zuko's percussive anger. Reclined in the lazyboy, Zuko's uncle Iroh, dressed only in a red silky robe and white tube socks studied a game of mahjong glowing on the tablet in his lap. "How was your day, Zuko?" he asked without looking up from the screen. "After my morning walk, I started a game with some old friends and I am happily surprised with the challenge they are giving me. The sounds from the computer don't quite compare to the clicks of the shuffled tiles, but it is nice to spend time with those far away. Do you want to help me figure out my next move? My old partner from the force just discarded a white board. Come look at my hand and help me decide whether to take it or not."

"He was there," Zuko growled from across the kitchen island, shocking his uncle out of concentration.

"My partner?" Uncle Iroh asked rising from his chair arthritically.

Zuko ripped a too-hot bite of hot pocket from it's protective hot pocket cozy, and spit the scalding mouthful onto the island. "No, Uncle, the boy!" he roared as he reached for a paper towel.

Uncle Iroh steering around the island, grabbed a paper towel to help his nephew. "Ah, yes, _the boy_ …" Confusion tinted the kindly man's assurance of recognition and curdled his smile beneath his gray beard. As he and his angry nephew wiped up hot pocket carnage, Iroh asked, "So where was _the boy_?"

"At school, Uncle! He was there in the cafeteria today. I could've done it right there. I should've."

"What do you want to do to the boy, Zuko?" inquired the Uncle as he threw the soiled paper towel into the trashcan beneath the sink and began to prepare a kettle of tea. Despite his age and appearance, the older man moved in the kitchen like a hand across smoothed marble.

Zuko's temper was flaring hotter than the stovetop, and the drumming began once again as he emphasized points with the pounding of fists and the punching of walls. "I don't know, uncle! Something! If I caught him, I could...I could take him home or...to the station! or something...I don't know...but I should've done something."

"Oh," said Uncle Iroh disappointingly, "So this was not a love interest." He pulled out a few tins of tea from the upper cabinets in their crowded kitchenette. Zuko's widened eye said more _no_ than screamed words could've done justice to. "What kind of tea would you like to go with your pizza pastry?" The teenager contained his anger enough to half-heartedly point at the container for chamomile, and his uncle took it along with the jasmine to the counter beside the silver sink. "I don't mean to doubt you, nephew, but perhaps this is another case of mistaken identity."

"IT WAS HIM!" howled Zuko as he kicked the little white fridge. Uncle Iroh did not react to the outburst, but instead calmly continued preparing a mug for each of them. "Don't make me fucking tea to try and calm me down. I know it this time." The younger of the two swatted at the infuser his uncle was filling up, but without effort, the old man in the red robe dodged the jab like a leaf dodging the wind. Tears started swelling in Zuko's eyes as he marched to his bedroom. The kettle started to squeal helplessly. Iroh saved the kettle from the stove and poured its contents into two mugs.

A knock came at Zuko's bedroom door before his Uncle crept in. The room did not look like a teenager's. The plain orange sheets and blankets were folded in hospital corners. The desk's contents were spare and practical. And behind the closet and inside the drawers, clothes were hung and folded. Every aspect of the room lacked personality in order to make room for order.

Iroh handed the mug with chamomile bleeding in tawny swirls through the hot water to his bed-strewn nephew who took it between his two hands. "For spending most of the day in a virtual game of Mahjong, I am certainly tired." He went on, "A nap might be helpful to you, too. The boy has averted your father for over a year, and your grandfather died in his pursuit for him. A little rest will help you see clearly."

Zuko stared into his tea like he could read fortunes. "They were already heroes, though. If I can bring him in—I just want to be like them, Uncle—if I bring him in, I can have that. You know what I mean?"

Iroh turned to look out the window at the hazy light slipping down between their complex and the brick wall of the neighboring tower. "They called it meiyo in Japan," he said, "honor."

"Well that's what I want, uncle," Zuko responded in between sips of chamomile. "Something like that."

—-

"Gran-gran," Katara called as she stepped into the dim kitchen. The overhanging lamp like a spotlight encircled Katara's grandmother, Kanna. Every evening she could reliably be found like this, a boulder curled over her book at the table, a site of revelation for the pilgrims venturing from their bedrooms. Her face was swollen with age and pinched into deep folds. Dry skin specked top of her skin like an old master's bistre drawing ignored and covered with dust. Her nightgown and matching slippers were decorated with little yellow crescents clawing for night in a white cotton sky. Above it all was her hair, a shiny ghostly shade, pulled into a bun during the day but now running down onto her shoulders like streams from a mountain glacier. She had grown ugly by many standards, shrunken, old, and poor in the little owl cove of the apartment, but her grandchildren's love tore down the canvas of beauty and discovered the vault, tough and filled with secret riches.

Her granddaughter, even occluded from the kitchen lamp's beam, was clearly sewn from the same fabric. The hair was dark, the skin umbre and smooth, but the sharpness in the eyes revealed the same steel and the same pearls of kindness tucked away beneath. She asked, "Can I invite someone over after school tomorrow?" Kana looked up from her book at Katara. "There's a new kid at school and I just thought it might be nice."

"No," answered a muffled voice from down the hall. "no, no, No, No, NO, NO!" The answer crescendoed as Sokka poured down the hallway from his room to brace himself in the kitchen doorway. "This kid's super weird, Gran! We should at least feel him out before we have him over."

"He is not! He's just different is all," Katara shot back.

"He didn't know what a fist bump was! Has he been frozen in ice for a hundred years or something?!"

"So what if he has? He was super nice to us even though one of us shouted at the top of our lungs in the cafeteria and one of us wears nothing but Family Guy pajama bottoms to bed!"

"Hey!" Sokka retorted glancing down as his outfit, "You just don't have the refined sense of humor an older man like me has developed!"

"You were shouting in the cafeteria?" Kanna asked concerned for her granddaughter.

"Sokka was blaming me for spilling his dumb Doritos."

"That's because you did spill my Doritos!"

"But you said girl's are always trying to show off!"

"I think we should have our guest over tomorrow." Gran said quietly amidst the storm brewing between the two pressure systems. "It wasn't too long ago I remember someone else having trouble at their new school." She glanced at her grandson.

Sokka whined, "But Gran, he could be a murderer or something."

"Oh, please," Katara said while rolling her eyes, "We'd be more likely to be killed calling the police."

It was Katara's turn to receive a wisened glance from her grandmother, but the one saved for her remark held much more anger. "I don't want to hear either of you talking about getting killed, alright!" The two grandkids agreed. "Death's coming one way or another, but I've dealt with enough of it for a while. I'll have some snacks ready for you all and our guest when you get home tomorrow—Oh, but I'll be babysitting the neighbor's kids...Oh well, open doors make open hearts."

Sensing the final word had been laid down, Sokka and Katara headed back to their rooms, the former spiteful and the latter gloating. Before Sokka slipped into his room, he whispered, "He's probably going to murder us in our sleep just like those weirdos in midtown." Katara was too taken aback to respond, not because Sokka had finally outwon her. No, she had remembered where she knew the boy from. The boy on the news. The boy who escaped the slaughter. The boy who went missing. Katara had found him.

—-

The wind warm with summer things blew in on Katara's face. She had shed her coat and laid it on her lap, and her dark hair was pulling on her scalp as the breeze combed through it. But it was tied back into a ponytail with little strands of braids weaved in from the front. Sokka was tucked farther back in the bus's stomach. And beside her now, so close that Appa could not move between their legs, Aang sat, excited to ride the bus — he had never ridden a school bus before, he explained excitedly at lunch — and he was giggling at the swirl of loose paper that traveled down the aisle. Katara couldn't find the opportunity at lunch, or perhaps she was just too nervous to look for one, but she sent encouraging thoughts to her faint reflection. Then, she turned to her new friend. "So I was wondering…" Aang turned expectantly to her with his thin and happy almond eyes. "I saw on the news a while back…"

Aang interrupted his seatmate. "Oh yeah," he laughed out as he rubbed the prickles on the back of his shaved head, "You're like the sixth person who thought I looked like him!"

Katara turned her gaze down toward the bus seat's sticky brown vinyl, "Oh, so you're not…" She pulled on a smile and met Aang's eyes with laughter, "But, duh, he can't just be out and about when the whole city's looking for him." Aang let out a quick laughing sound and stared back down the aisle to watch the whirl of lost homework die.

A street light flickers then darkens while rain pours down. Aang pulls Appa's collar directing him toward the dimmed corner. Storm clouds like taxi cabs rush toward him down every street, but the lightning flashes red then blue, and the thunder booms with siren songs and deep-voiced interrogations. Tears are welling up in his eyes. "No, no, no," he whispers to himself through the cracks of fear in his voice. He keeps turning. Storms down converge at the crossroads. Then he glances at the closest building. The fire escape dangles low. He and Appa sprint to it. First he shoves Appa up. Then the boy climbs the first flight. The same on the second flight. Then Again. And. Again. Until they reach the top roof. They look down as the angry clouds consume the black streetcorner where he and Appa had been standing. He turns and looks across the roofed landscape. Appa starts to run and Aang, now sobbing, follows without hesitation. They jump to reach the next roof. Suddenly gravity tugs harder on them, and they fall into a split between the buildings that was not there when they first leapt. The skyline, the buildings, Appa, the ground all transform into screaming blurs. Aang is not any different.

"Aang, Aang, wake up," Katara whispers concernedly to her friend, whose grunting and thrashing has drawn more than a few stares from the other passengers on the bus. He opens his warm brown eyes and smiles, though his brows remain furrowed, as if the afternoon sunlight is too much. He doesn't notice anyone else except the girl beside him, framed beatifically in front of the sunlit bus window. "I think you might've been having a nightmare or something," she says in her most comforting voice. Very comforting, indeed, if Aang's sense of comfort upon hearing it is anything to go by. "It's okay, though, we're here."

"So this is our apartment," Katara offered as she reached toward the door handle.

"Not so fast," countered Sokka as he blocked the entry, "You'll have to go through a full security clearance before you take a step into my house!"

"So mi casa no es tu casa?" Aang asked with a teasing fae expression.

"Nice try," replied Sokka. "But it's standard procedure." Katara observed grumpily as her borther began patting down Aang. Sokka lectured as he went, happy to have a captive audience, "When you're the man of the house, you have to take extra responsibilities, especially when the police are more likely to help your family into jail than help out."

Aang giggled as Sokka's hand moved up his inner legs. "That tickles!"

"You know what, you've earned enough of my trust that you don't need a _full_ search..." Sokka said, blushing, before ascending the entirety of Aang's inseam. He glanced at Appa, sitting beside Aang's feet. "And you don't have any places to hide anything." The boy and the dog, both took a step preparing to enter the apartment before Sokka added, "But I will need to dig through your backpack!" Aang and Katara both huffed this time at Sokka's militant approach to hospitality. They began chatting as Sokka steamed forward with the might of the TSA.

"What's this?" asked Sokka as he pulled out a wooden contraption.

The visitor looked up from his conversation. "Oh!," he exclaimed, diving in to grab it. "It's a flying machine!" He held it out the way Ash Ketchum holds out a pokeball with a newly captured member of his team. Sokka cocked an eyebrow incredulously, and Katara, though more compassionately, offered a similar expression of disbelief. "No, it really is!"

Ever the model of tight security, Sokka grabbed it out of Aang's hand. "Well, I'll hold onto it for now so we can investigate a little more before giving it back." With that, the bald-headed boy was fed up with the procedures. He made a swift twirling movement toward Sokka. Then Aang was suddenly behind the security guard, the wooden machine in one hand and the door handle in the other.

"How about I just show you how it works," he said with a mischievous smirk as he twisted the door handle. The door swung open to a pair of children tearing across the kitchen with laughter, and Gran-Gran turning to greet the gaggle from the sink. Aang tossed his little machine through the doorway and the pieces of balsa glued together with tea-dyed cotton joined the joyful chaos.

"See, Gran-Gran," called Katara as she stepped in and dropped off her backpack in the doorway of her room, "I told you he was great." The sparkling admiration in her eyes and in her voice derived as much from the glider somehow navigating the confines of the bustling apartment as from the display of agility Aang used to get past Sokka.

Kanna laughed and looked back down at her hands and the colorful plastic children's cups she held, all enveloped in suds. "Yes, everyone is always full of exciting surprises."

"Yeah, but I think Aang has more than most! And I think he knows something about martial arts! And he's so wise too!" Both Katara and her grandmother looked over at the boy they were discussing as the flyer bashed him in the head, knocking him off balance onto the floor, where the two neighbors' kids hopped onto him as if he was 's "Pop."

"We'll see, noozhis," said Gran Gran, she brought her soapy hands to Katara's soft brown cheeks. "There's only one bit of wisdom you need anyway: Mino-doodaw gakina awiya, mino-doodaw gakina gegoo." she recited. While leaving Katara's face cupped in her palms, she looked at her grandson, who was now instructing the neighbor's children how to properly protect themselves with their fists against the new intruder. Gran-gran sighed, "Help your brother remember that, too." Katara nodded.

"Go again," commanded Iroh as he leaned in the gym corner behind the punching bag. With a calm breath, Zuko squared up to the hung up target, then let his fists and feet fly, grunting and growling for added impact. Other much older men in the gym glanced up from their own workouts to admire (with a glaze of intimidation) the teenage boy's aggression. The sweat not already darkening Zuko's burgundy T-shirt flung from sopping strands of hair onto the blue matted floor beneath Zuko's steady feet. He paused panting and glared at his uncle.

"No. You're still fighting with your muscles," Iroh grunted, "Where's the breath?! If you don't have that, you can't have the fire!" Zuko hadn't moved. Iroh instructed, "Again."

To the onlookers, a blur was all they saw next. Zuko had spun and threw a kick at his uncle, but, when the motion ended, Iroh held his nephew's bare foot in his hand with a stern expression. Zuko pulled his leg back to steady himself on the ground. Zuko yelled, "I've been going at this for over an hour! I'm ready for the next set!"

Iroh countered with simmering intensity, "No, you haven't even mastered the foundations."

The two were interrupted by a beefed-up guy who strutted over at just the wrong time to ask if he could get in a set. In a flash, Zuko stripped the man of his balance and threw him with a well-placed jab to the floor. The fuming teenager looked back at his uncle as the man scurried away like any other gym rat. "This kid's been trained since birth. How am I supposed to take him if I'm still practicing the basics?!" The two locked eyes. Zuko determined to compel his uncle's will. "You will teach me the advanced sets," the student demanded.

Though the eye contact was not lost, Iroh's gaze softened. "Okay, my little prince." Zuko cringed at hearing the childhood nickname used by his family, but he swaggered triumphantly back to his place in front of the punching bag. "But first," continued Iroh, "I am ready for a break by the snack machines! I've had my eye on the Flaming cheetohs since we came in." Zuko huffed as he followed his uncle, while the gym goers split like biblical oceans to let the pair pass.

"All right, kiddos," Sokka began, "we've had our fun and games, but it's time for a serious conversation." The audience were the two young neighbors who sat still and wide-eyed on the couch, little buckets filled with cuteness that might spill over with the slightest movement. Their awed faces encouraged Sokka onward, "This city's not safe for people like us." One of the neighbors raised his little brown hand. "Yes, Charlie?"

Charlie addressed his superior, "Mr. Chief Leader Sokka, siryessir?" Sokka nodded assent for the boy to share his thought, "You have a big booger in your nose." Sokka's furrowed brow immediately washed away in the flood of red-faced embarrassment. He flailed as he turned around to privately remove the green distraction in the hallway.

In that moment, Katara stepped from her room, stumbling right into her brother's nose-mining project with a look of confusion and disgust. "I'm assuming here that you haven't damaged your eyesight while digging so deep up your nose, but have you seen Aang?" she asked. "We were working on homework, but he stepped out to get something, and he's been gone for like a half hour."

Sokka speedily pulled out his finger, now doubly embarrassed and exponentially redder. He tried to recover by wagging it as an answer, but this just led to the snot-slathered finger shimmering in the hall's fluorescent light and Katara's mounting revulsion. Suddenly a fart echoed down the hallway breaking the tension into flaws of laughter in the house and giving Sokka the necessary distraction to wipe his finger off on his pants. The toilet flushed, the sink purred, and out stepped the merry boy with the arrow hat. "I feel like I haven't used the bathroom for a century," he sighed, joining in on the joke.

"Okay, okay, okay," Sokka repeated, attempting to quell the joy with his sense of authority, "It's time for business." But when he turned to the couch, the two little embodiments of cuteness had vanished. A wild howl rang from Katara's bedroom, quickly followed by a blur of cloud-white fluff saddled by the two children. "Stop!" Sokka demanded. "We don't have time for this! They'll be kicking us out of here before you know it!"

"Who will?" Aang asked, the same expression of naivete still radiating from his whole being.

"You're kidding, right?" Sokka replied, eyebrow cocked.

"You have Play-dough!" Aang rang out. The cinnamon roll leapt to the moldable toy, kneeled on the floor, and set to the craft with a huge smile. "Look, I made a penguin!" He called to the siblings. And they saw that he certainly had. Then the pair traded glances with each other full of concern and confusion for their child-like guest.

Katara sat down by her guest on the floor as her brother wrangled his two adorable soldiers. "So Aang," Katara started.

But the boy quickly interrupted her, "What are you going to make? I can show you how to make a penguin!"

Katara let out a little laugh. "Okay, you can show me how to make one." And she took a lump of the neon dough and followed Aang's direction. "Would you also maybe teach me how to waterbend?" she asked reluctantly amidst their sculpting.

"Yeah! Of course I would!" he answered, with a face like a smiling emoji. "Oh," he said, his face suddenly turning down, "except I don't know how to waterbend. I can just airbend. What about your grandma, or someone else you know from the city?"

Katara paused as she pressed the wing onto her bright penguin. She replied flatly without looking at her friend, "Gran-gran never learned how. I haven't found anyone in the city who can waterbend, actually. I've visited all the community houses, but no one in the area knows it. You're looking at the only waterbender in the whole city, and I'm barely that."

Aang looked at Katara who kept her eyes focused on her Play-do project, "Well, how did you learn it, then? I thought Native families taught it to each other? That's what I learned, at least."

The girls hands kept busy. "Sokka and I didn't grow up in the city. We were born on the rez that's an hour south." Aang looked hopefully at her, but his hope receded as she went on, "But not very many people knew it there either."

Sorrow bellowed all of Katara's confessions, and Aang held back from prying further into his new friend's experiences. He watched as her hands continued to add small details to her animal. A spark suddenly relit his golden face with a hopeful smile. "Let's go to a different reservation then!" Katara glanced up from her handiwork for the first time in the conversation, her facial features all unsure what expression they wanted to form as a response. Aang explained, "Someone will have to know! Waterbending hasn't disappeared entirely. We just have to meet the right person to teach you!"

A smile, Katara's dark features decided, but her voice hadn't caught up. "I haven't ever travelled out of the area before."

"It'll be fun!" Aang encouraged, "I've travelled all over the place!"

"Alright," Katara said, her voice finding the smile now, too, "I finished my penguin!" It was a chunky little penguin. Katara had textured it with her fingernails to give it a sense of feathers, and it had long eyebrows leaping off it's face like a macaroni penguin. "I haven't done anything like this sense I was young," she said giddily.

"You still _are_ young," Aang countered, standing up with his own creation. "Come on, let's take our penguins on an adventure!" He held his penguin up around eye level and imagined it jumping off the window sills and sliding down the walls of the hallway. Katara, like a duckling, followed.

The street was buried in their laughter, cascading heavy-gutted into echoes through all the alleyways and up, up, up across the tops of buildings like marvel heroes saving the city. Their neon penguins leaping in their owners' eyes between ledges, diving at parked cars only to swoop into fantastic flight again. Down the street and away from the apartment flew the impossible childhoods, zig-zagging on the sidewalks through the dread of evening shifters departing and the bent backs of day laborers returning. Down, down, down, then around the corner, and another, around and around and around.

Until they were there. The twelve-story building stood as any other building in the neighborhood, reflecting Aang's joy off its brutalist facade as all the others had. But Katara didn't give it the chance to touch her's. Her gaze was cold upon it, and her friend took note, reeling in his mirth. As he looked longer at the building, its loneliness stood out. No tenants or workers filing through the doors. No lights in the windows. Chains across the entrance and barbed wire spiraling along the surrounding fence. Then, he read the forsaken letters above the doors: _City Correctional Facility_.

"What is this place?" Aang asked.

"An awful memory is what it is. It's a prison, Aang...Aang?" Her eyes darted around searching for the bald head or the blue arrow hat. Both were squeezing between the fettered entrance gate. "Aang! Stop! We're not supposed to go in there! We have no idea if there's security cameras or if people come check on it or anything."

"Katara," the boy sandwiched between two chain-linked fences chided as she approached, "you'll have to get over your fear if you wanna be a great bender." She paused as Aang, now through the gates and officially trespassing, started toward the doors. Her eyes pinched closed, and with a huff, she followed suit.

Through a broken pane, they crawled into what was surely once a waiting room lit in starchy green fluorescence. Only building bones were left, none of the fineries like easily stackable chairs, curly-corded telephones, or poorly stocked vending machines. "Spooky, right?" Aang asked into the dim memory of a reception room.

"I don't think you understand, Aang," Katara explained as she tried a door on the opposite end of the room and found it open. She motioned for the boy to follow her in. She went on as they passed through rooms with plastic visitor screens and then the expected bar-guarded cells. "This place has been a noose hanging over my people forever—since Gran-gran was little. It was the first prison built in the state by the Fire Nation. And it was built to hold us, my people." Aang furrowed his brows and stared at his new friend in the dark stale hall.

"I haven't heard about any of this, though."

She rolled her eyes. "Not many people have."

"But I've known Fire Nation people, they wouldn't have done this."

"Well, maybe in your perfect home school, everything was hunky-dory, but out here in the real world, this is exactly what they did."

His breath left him, while Katara's tears found her. "And the worst part is, is that the place, right here, that this awful prison is built on, this is supposed to be a sacred place. It used to be a place to gather our nation, all the tribes together. And I guess in the end it still was." She swiped at her tears with her sleeve as she added the bitter end to her history.

"I'm...I'm sorry, Katara. I didn't know."

"Yeah, well welcome to the real world."

"It's been a bit of a rude awakening," he said, dodging her gaze.

"Aang, is there something your not telling me?" she asked. He shrugged. Putting her hand on his shoulder she assured him, "You can trust me."

"I think something happened to my family…"

"But weren't they like the only people you knew?" Katara asked. Aang nodded his bald head and arrow cap, the tears, freed from Katara, now finding him. Katara wrapped an arm around the boy. "It's okay. Let's get out of here."

They headed back the way they came, Aang's fingers dragging across the dusty bars like they were playing a prisoner's glissando, but on the last bar, they caught tighter and pulled the door open. Suddenly, alarms rang out terrifying the two trespassers into an outright sprint toward the exit. Without stopping to check-out at the reception desk, they blasted through the entrance and tumbled out the broken door pane, only slowing down as they approached the tight squeeze at the entrance gate.

They filed into a two person line and started to suck in their stomachs in preparation for the squeeze, when they noticed the pigeons cooing and an airplane flying over and horns honking on another block, which would all be insignificant sounds to appreciate at a moment of emergency, but, in this case, they were sounds of relief. The walls imprisoned sound as well as imprisoned inmates, it seemed. The two adventurers' bellies relaxed into allayed laughter. "Wanna see a trick?" Aang offered, feeling bold in their newfound safety. Katara smiled in affirmation. Without a moment's hesitation, the boy leapt the fence in one bound, while his friend stood wide jawed. She slid back through the fence and started the walk home under the mixture of dusk and street lamps, in giddy conversation over Aang's display of airbending, both happy in their undetected escape.

More happy to be undetected were a boy, accompanied by his uncle, on his walk home from the gym as he noticed two figures pouring out of the abandoned correctional facility. To maintain his happiness and, therefore, necessarily the secrecy, the pair kept a safe distance from the boy and girl as they followed them to their home.

So I've only written this so far...If you're interested in this continuing, let me know. My imagined scenarios for the future of this story have some plots and pairings that vary from the original...Idk.


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